October 23, 2009

Sure enough, last week, just as New Haven prepared to promote a group consisting almost entirely of white fire captains and lieutenants based on the exam results, a black New Haven firefighter, Michael Briscoe, filed a disparate-impact lawsuit against the city. Like Frank Ricci, Briscoe is a sympathetic plaintiff. He received the highest score of any candidate on the oral portion of the lieutenant's promotion exam. But he isn't eligible for promotion because the city based 60 percent of each candidate's score on the written exam. On this part of the test, Briscoe—like most black candidates for promotion—did comparatively badly. ...

UPDATED: Fortunately, the test scores were posted by Adversity.net, and we can figure out who Briscoe is pretty easily.

Actually, Briscoe did very badly on the written test in any sense. Although he scored a 92.08 on the oral test, he only scored a 59 on the blind-graded written test, putting him 66th out of the 77 test-takers on that test. He scored 13th out of 19 blacks on the written-exam. Overall, counting both the oral and written exams, Briscoe finished 24th, with five blacks ahead of him. Why is Briscoe more deserving than the five blacks who did better under the rules?

Briscoe had the largest divergence in scores between the two tests of any of the 77 test-takers, implying his high score on the oral part could well be a fluke. Oral tests are more likely to produce unreliable scores because the sample size of questions per hour of testing is smaller due to the lower bandwidth of oral vs. written communication.

Or, perhaps Briscoe is a smooth talker who can impress outsiders in the short run, but lacks the job knowledge to maintain the confidence of underlings in even the medium run.

This is a classic example of why Disparate Impact is worse than plain old racial quotas. There are five black guys who are better under the rules than Briscoe, but now we're supposed to rip up the rules and use a different system that will promote Briscoe ahead of the five more competent blacks, as well as push a lot of less qualified whites and Hispanics ahead of more qualified whites and Hispanics.

Moreover, if you changed the weighting on the Lieutenant's test to favor the Oral component over the Written component, that would have Disparate Impact on Hispanics!

Briscoe's claim is a perfect example. Why didn't black candidates do as well as whites on the written exam? Black firefighters argue that because whites are more likely to come from families where firefighting is a legacy (for instance, one New Haven captain's father and grandfather both served as fire chief in New Haven), they are more likely to get help from a network of friends and relatives in studying for the written exam. Few blacks have such family connections—in large part because blacks were deliberately shut out of firefighting jobs until the 1970s, when black firefighters won discrimination suits in New Haven and in many other cities nationwide. ... So heavy reliance on a written exam, if it gives an advantage to legacy candidates, could perpetuate the evils of past discrimination.

Damn white fire geeks always studying how to save people's lives!

Kind of like how Slate's other Ricci expert, Emily Bazelon got her job writing about the law by being the second cousin of Betty Friedan and the granddaughter of the most powerful non-Supreme Court judge in America, David Bazelon. Except she didn't have to pass a written exam to get the cushy Truman Capote Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Law at New Haven's Yale Law School.

That violates Title VII, unless the exam is job related and there are no less discriminatory alternatives. New Haven's written exam may be as good as any written exam could have been: The Supreme Court in its ruling in favor of the white firefighters in Ricci pointed out that the city's written test was carefully developed by a professional company to be job-related and to avoid racial disparities. But Briscoe argues that the written exam did not, in fact, test for the skills that fire captains and lieutenants need on the ground; instead, it rewarded rote memorization. As for alternatives, Briscoe says that the city could have relied more heavily on the oral exam, which required candidates to respond to real-life firefighting and training scenarios. Neither the city nor the company that designed the exam defended making it worth 60 percent of the promotion score. Briscoe also points out that New Haven could have used an assessment-center model, which tests candidates through simulations of real-life job challenges. Many other cities use assessment centers successfully.

Although Ricci was often described as a challenge to affirmative action, getting rid of a flawed exam isn't affirmative action and doesn't push diversity at the expense of merit.

Yes, it is affirmative action. The reason Professor Ford wants more weight given to the oral test is because the oral test is inherently flawed.

The key difference between the oral and written test is that the written test was blind-graded while the grading of the oral test was racially rigged from the outset by making almost two-thirds of the judges minorities, which is highly unrepresentative of the distribution of senior firefighting leadership expertise.

The whole point of civil service examinations is to eliminate favoritism, which is why the union insisted on a 60% weighting in favor of the blind-graded test over the easily-rigged oral test.

102 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Like Frank Ricci, Briscoe is a sympathetic plaintiff. He received the highest score of any candidate on the oral portion of the lieutenant's promotion exam. But he isn't eligible for promotion because the city based 60 percent of each candidate's score on the written exam. On this part of the test, Briscoe—like most black candidates for promotion—did comparatively badly. ...

Call me insensitive but I'm not seeing how this makes Briscoe "sympathetic". He did badly on the exam. End of story.

They should present Mr. Briscoe's test and explain each item he missed and how it is relevant to firefighting. All this "characterizing" of the validity of the test needs some daylight. Have them read the missed questions and let the court record show what the guy doesn't know. We are all reasonable people. No reason to hide the missed questions.

Get out Bloom's Taxonomy and we'll see whether he only missed "rote memorization" questions or whether he missed analysis and synthesis questions.

Let's have a look. Show the "unfair" test questions to the court. Bring in experts to testify to the value of the command of such firefighting expertise.

"New Haven captain's father and grandfather both served as fire chief in New Haven), they are more likely to get help from a network of friends and relatives in studying for the written exam"

i.e. get a copy of the examination beforehand and memorize the answers or they just happen to know someone that just happened to have a hand in creating the test. It happens all the time, some of these these certification tests are just mere formalities for some people, wonder why we bother with them anyways.

Of course, if Brisco got the highest score in written but did poorly in the oral, he would be complaining that too much of the test is graded by arbitrary matters of personality and style than real/actual knowledge. He's just another jerk who acts in pure bad faith.

Call me insensitive but I'm not seeing how this makes Briscoe "sympathetic". He did badly on the exam. End of story.

It's more complicated than that. He did poorly on the written portion relative to those whose overall score led to their eventual promotion (of course, after the Supreme Court battle), but as the highest scorer on the oral portion, all others did poorly relative to him.

I don't think that it's a simple exercise to dismiss his case by saying he didn't do as well overall, therefore his case has no merit. Indeed, if I'm reading correctly, the case is that the test itself over-weighted the section that he did poorly on.

Now, personally, I am in favor of the post-Supreme Court status quo--that is, I think that Ricci et al. should get the promotions that they were promised through their performance on the test and I am skeptical of the disparate impact doctrine that has dominated the practice of law with regard to these issues for decades.

But I think to say that there aren't sympathetic aspects of Briscoe's case is to be blinded by ideology.

Just to note the two stories you have side-by-side. One is about black underrepresentation in ______ (insert field here: today it's firefighters, tomorrow it's college enrollment). The other is about Jewish overrepresentation among ______ (today it's American billionaires, but it could just as easily be about the US Senate, Nobel laureates, enrollment in the Ivy League, whatever).

The first we're supposed to worry obsessively about. The first is proof positive of how downright evil and discriminatory American society is. The first we must spend billion, tens of billions, hundreds of billions to correct, even if it tanks the economy.

The second we're just supposed to take for granted - assuming we're even allowed to notice it at all.

Thanks for the data source, Steve. In order for this man to crack the top 10, the exam would need to weight the oral section as 69.5% of the total score (from 40%), moving his total score to 81.9906.

What's really interesting about this is that if we used the ratio for ALL respondents, then 14 of the 19 black fire fighters end up with lower scores. Particularly the guy who came in 15th (86 on the written, which was the 10th highest on the written score).

I did a correlation of the oral score to the written score controlling for race, and Blacks did have the highest correlation (0.39 vs 3.6 for the group) which may or may not be meaningful.

Let's say professor Ford needs brain surgery for some reason. He can choose between a private health plan, all of whose participating doctors had to pass all the usual tests that doctors need to pass and a hypothetical hyper-Obamified "public option" whose participating doctors were certified in a more inclusive, comprehensive and non-judgmental fashion. With an oral test.

And how about professor Ford resigning from the bar in favor of more deserving folks, those who would have passed a less judgmental, more inclusive, more oral bar exam than the one he passed?

Like Frank Ricci, Briscoe is a sympathetic plaintiff. He received the highest score of any candidate on the oral portion of the lieutenant's promotion exam. But he isn't eligible for promotion because the city based 60 percent of each candidate's score on the written exam. On this part of the test, Briscoe—like most black candidates for promotion—did comparatively badly.

Wow, black guy excels on portion of exam that is gameable by charisma, confidence, and bluff (i.e. all the elements that go into black male "flash") but bombs on portion requiring boring whitebread skills like reading comprehension (but hey, a firefighter ain't gonna never need to do something as boring-ass as read a sign, right?) And in other amazing news, flea bites dog.

Wow, black guy excels on portion of exam that is gameable by charisma, confidence, and bluff

1) I've never noticed that black guys possess these attributes in abundance, in spite of what some of the insecure white commenters on HBD sites seem to think.

2) I can think of no reason why "charisma, confidence, and bluff" should aid anyone in a verbal exam. I've been to lots of technical interviews. Knowing what you're talking about is a must, attitude is not really much of an issue.

I'm curious as to why black applicants did so much better in the verbal, as no obvious reason exists for such a result. Is it genuine, or was the verbal put in place specifically to identify and aid the black applicants?

When do we get to start breaking down the"white" scores into individual nationalities and looking at the nation-to-nation discrimination? The statute says no discrimination on the basis of religion, nation origin, race and gender, as I remember. How do you think the Jews would do as opposed to the Irish or hte Italians for college professors? And how do you thing the Ashkenazi would do as compared to the the Sephardi or Mizrachi or Yemeni or Beta Israel? And speaking of Jewish religions, how do the Reform compare to Charedi, (or for that matter, the MO, or Skvers or Lubavitchers)?

Frankly, I think we could find some truly grotesque disparities, not only between Jews but between Jews and Gentiles as well, don't you?

"For most black men, their outgoing personality manifests in aggression."

Extraversion has nothing to do with aggression, I don't think Dahmer, Bundy or the Unibomber were what you would call back-slappers.

Aggression comes from ego, impuslsivity, non-connectedness to society at large, and having learned the world largely by oneself as a child.in other words, a lack of fear of the consequences.

"Were the exam answers written with pencils? Because pencils are racist."

My lawyer once gave me the greatest piece of advice I've ever had:

He said "never, ever trust a man who goes by his initial."

The truth is, this is not 1933, and the firemen do not put fires out in a wooden truck with a dalmatian running along side. What do firefighters in urban areas attend to; 3 fires a year?

Firefighting is a public service position more than anything else, and for that reason, Mr. Briscoe cand probably make a strong case that leadership and the oral portion of the exam are weighed too lowly in comparison with the written exam.

Why would he have had so much more trouble with the written test? The obvious guess is that he doesn't read all that well. That doesn't need to mean being unable to read a sign. Bad eyesight, dyslexia, or just never having learned to read very well can make it hard to do complicated tasks in writing.

Alternatively, maybe some one-off event happened that screwed him over on the written test--maybe he had a stomach bug and was sprinting to the bathroom every twenty minutes during his written test or something. Hell, maybe the guy forgot his glasses that day.

One thing is clear: Having this set of cases drag on and on must have completely wrecked the morale in that fire department. Perhaps there is some benefit to hashing these issues out in court (though I think mostly, we're doing that to kick the controversial issues down the road and make unelected judges make hard decisions instead of susceptible-to-losing-elections congressmen). But it's a complete disaster for anyone in New Haven who wants a functioning fire department to haul them out of a burning building.

Good thing about being a Sailerist: the people you hate will always be wrong.

I find this whole we're going to educate our youths business very feminine. I've worked as a substitute teacher. The majority of kids are very dumb but don't seem to be in any psychic pain over it. Only liberals are.

“I'm curious as to why black applicants did so much better in the verbal, as no obvious reason exists for such a result. Is it genuine, or was the verbal put in place specifically to identify and aid the black applicants?”

The latter. They did better because the oral exam was not blind graded. All the examiners could see the examinee’s race. 2/3rds of the examiners were minorities and there are many whites who seem to fall all over themselves to bestow benefits on any black who can spout out a few coherent sentences. (See our current POTUS for an example.)

“What is the correlation between exam scores and ability to perform his new job functions?... What does the test tell you about the real abilities of a person, because if it does not- it is worse than useless.”

You clearly need to read more about psychometric testing. Here’s a start:

If, as Briscoe says, the written exam only rewards rote memorisation then we must ask what is wrong with his memory. If rote memorisation was all that was required wouldn't it have been much easier to have gone through flash cards a few hours a day than to fail and file a lawsuit?

But I think to say that there aren't sympathetic aspects of Briscoe's case is to be blinded by ideology.

Nonsense. It's completely unreasonable to think that an oral exam with the grader (probably) being a black civil servant who himself has an IQ 20 points too low for his job should weigh as much as a written test.

I calculated some correlations between written and oral exams from the data at the adversity.com site. The correlation for blacks on the captains exam is strikingly low. A low correlation between the blindly-graded written exam and the oral exam suggests the grading on the oral exam may not have been objective--either that or the subjects can't read very well.

Notice how the blacks are the only group to have done as well or better on the oral exam as on the written, while both white's and hispanics scored considerably lower on the subjective oral exam than the objective written exam. Almost looks like the oral exams were rigged to give the blacks higher scores.

The era of affirmative action (in any form) is coming to end due to a drastic lack of funds.

Socialism bankrupts in all its forms and we are at the end of this sad chapter of the Great Society.

Hello? America is broken and broke. Very soon there will be no more transfer payments forthcoming from Uncle Sam. The state county and municipal governments are also going belly up.

It's questionable whether New Haven will be able to pay any firefighters in the coming years. I'm dead serious. They will likely be volunteers in the future. The federal state and local government job base is going to be slashed to the bone due to lack of tax revenues. This crisis has been brewing and is about to blow sky high.

Steve your pal Denninger has been sounding the alarm. We are headed for a sudden stop in .gov operations due to the extreme malfeasance rampant throughout the Treasury the Fed and the Congress and the States.

The pathetic video of FDIC boss Sheila Bair making the rounds today is Joe & Jane 6-Pack's final wake up call. Our massive banking crisis is about to bust loose much bigger and badder than 2007-2008.

"It's completely unreasonable to think that an oral exam with the grader (probably) being a black civil servant who himself has an IQ 20 points too low for his job should weigh as much as a written test."

Is it, or is it completely unreasonable to pull a short work of fiction backed up by absolutely nothing out of your ass and expect others to buy it as truth?

"What do you think the oral section is intended for?"

Probably to see how firefighters deal with the public, as it is unreasonable to expect a 12 year old who's parents are trapped in a burning house to grab a legal pad and write down where they are located.

"Almost looks like the oral exams were rigged to give the blacks higher scores."

Does it, or does your conclusion on the statistics almost look like, well, GIGO?

"(i.e. all the elements that go into black male "flash")....

Wow! -- I wish I had said that."

Well, I can tell you how to get it; you see, first you start off by working on the "male" part...you know, being strong and silent and all that.

- The very first prerequisite to putting more weight on the oral exam is videotaping its administration, so its fairness can be scrutinized as effectively as the written exam can be.- Are the UCs overrun with Asians because somehow they're more privileged than whites when it comes to obtaining study resources?

Looks like we'll be hearing more about these "assessment centers" that the minority was talking up in Ricci. I'm suspicious of these enterprises. Let's just say that employers might find very attractive an outside agency that would act as a kind of black box -- just send us your applicants and we'll put them through our somewhat mysterious and inscrutable process and the outcome will be a list of hires that includes at least the minimum number of blacks and Hispanics to avoid a lawsuit.

The truth is, this is not 1933, and the firemen do not put fires out in a wooden truck with a dalmatian running along side. What do firefighters in urban areas attend to; 3 fires a year?

Firefighting is a public service position more than anything else, and for that reason, Mr. Briscoe cand probably make a strong case that leadership and the oral portion of the exam are weighed too lowly in comparison with the written exam.

You have to be extremely delusional and or stupid to seriously say something like this.

Frankly, I find all these endless "Aha!" denunciations of AA to be pretty wearisome...

Anyone with two braincells knows perfectly well that the justifications are total nonsense, and endlessly rebutting total nonsense seems pretty pointless to me.

The basic dynamics of the situation are really just "who-whom", and it's obviously the balance of media/political power which determines that "who-whom". What the Soviets used to call the "correlation of forces" is the central matter to focus on, nothing else.

I suppose that when Robert Mugabe sent his bands of "youths" to beat, rob, and loot the farms and property of people he didn't like, he issued some legal decree or something to justify the action. But I tend to doubt that raising endless objections to the validity of those decrees would have really made much difference.

Basically, when and if the balance of media/political changes, the regime of AA will vanish like a soap-bubble (and many other things will change as well!). But until then, it will solidly remain in place, whether or not a thousand conservative lawyers waste their careers on the issue.

Let's be honest: there are mental requirements to be a firefighter, and there are physical requirements, but you don't need to be a Nobel laureate for the first or an Olympic athlete for the second. And lets also be honest that tightening up the written requirements is really about keeping blacks out. Surely speed is important for firefighters too -- doesn't it matter how fast a firefighter can race into a burning building? So should we have 100 yard dashes as a testing requirement and make that worth 50% of the score? Can't have that, because blacks would score better on it, right?

"Probably to see how firefighters deal with the public, as it is unreasonable to expect a 12 year old who's parents are trapped in a burning house to grab a legal pad and write down where they are located."

Firefighters don't answer 911 calls. Are you trying to set a record for how many idiotic things you can say in one thread?

"What does the test tell you about the real abilities of a person, because if it does not- it is worse than useless."

The whole reason we have these useless tests is so that bureaucrats can cover their asses with some "objective" standards for hiring. Imagine if the fire chief was white, and promoted three white guys because he thought they were the best guys. Forget about it.

Of course, in this case it backfired because the mayor wanted to see a bunch of blacks get promoted, but they couldn't even make the cutoff on the test even though it was heavily rigged in their favor. Ironically, if we didn't live in a society so paranoid about racism, they could have just promoted the blacks without all of this hullabahoo.

"Surely speed is important for firefighters too -- doesn't it matter how fast a firefighter can race into a burning building? So should we have 100 yard dashes as a testing requirement and make that worth 50% of the score? Can't have that, because blacks would score better on it, right?"

There are physical requirements to be a firefighter. But these are the results for Lt./Capt. promotion exams, meaning (a) these men already passed the physical tests when they were relevant, and (b) they are no longer relevant, as Lts. and, especially Capts. are leadership positions and don't spend as much time fighting fires.

Hence the importance of the exam: the oral portion gauges the applicant's ability to communicate while the written portion gauges the applicant's knowledge.

As was pointed out above, the black average on both portions was lower than the white average. Even if the portions were weighted 50/50, the overall results would've been the same.

Your point, which I assume you thought was brilliant, is quite irrelevant. Try again.

Seems to me that having a family tradition of being firemen (sorry, firefighters) would be just as likely aid you on the oral exam. This is totally made up, I know nothing about firefighting, but wouldn't for instance grandpappy's endlessly told story of being almost caught up in a "backdraft" give you, almost by osmosis, the kind of knowledge that would help you deal with any "situational" questions posed? Wouldn't being exposed to table talk about firefighting from an early age help you in being able to baffle 'em with BS, as my father used to say?

Let's! that's a great point, but as Orwell noted long ago, leftists -- not even leftists, just PC syncophants -- are quite comfortable holding two contradictory thoughts in their heads at the very same time. Kind of like a sword swallower or a porn star has to conquer the gag reflex, the typical pundit has to overcome aversion to cognitive dissonance.

Steve,During the last Ricci case, I was astounded that no one researched Austin TX in the last 10 years, all of the proposed nuances (weighted boards, B-PAD, test validations, the whole shmeer) have been done in Austin. Mainly driven my Mexican race meddlers, the black was always held up for all to prop the door open and run Mexican candidates in the building). If one researched Austin TX they would find a percursory microcosm of all the proposed "better systems" and see where Austin is right now. Blacks, Mexicans, Lesbians, oh, and some hetero females all trying to improve the system and failing. The Fire Chief told me that they quit tracking the number of applicants and their race cuz it was not productive to diversity! Check it out, find someone in Austin and you will be surprised that many of the arguments have already been tried and failed there. The powers that be always say NO standards were lowered, maybe that is what stands in the way of diversity?

Firefighting is a public service position more than anything else, and for that reason, Mr. Briscoe cand probably make a strong case that leadership and the oral portion of the exam are weighed too lowly in comparison with the written exam.

"For most black men, their outgoing personality manifests in aggression. For a select few, it manifests in a unique ability and desire to interact socially."

Interesting article on police brutality:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0106.coates.html

Black and Blue

Why does America's richest black suburb have some of the country's most brutal cops?

The violence perpetrated by the P.G. cops is a curious development. Usually, police brutality is framed as a racial issue: Rodney King suffering at the hands of a racist white Los Angeles Police Department or more recently, an unarmed Timothy Thomas, gunned down by a white Cincinnati cop. But in more and more communities, the police doing the brutalizing are African Americans, supervised by African-American police chiefs, and answerable to African-American mayors and city councils. In the case of P.G. County, the brutality is cast against the backdrop of black America's power base, the largest concentration of the black middle class in the country.

A bedroom community of the nation's capital, Prince George's county is the only suburban county ever to become richer as it became blacker. According to the Census Bureau, the county, which is 63 percent black, had a median income of $47,000 in 1997, more than double the median income for African Americans and almost $10,000 more than the median income for whites.

Beyond economics, P.G. County's African-American residents boast a formidable amount of political power. The county executive, the state's attorney, and the chairman of the county council are all black, as are 41 percent of the police officers, including the one who killed Prince Jones.

> I've been to lots of technical interviews. Knowing what you're talking about is a must, attitude is not really much of an issue. <

In what field? Computers? Astrophysics? What does "technical interview" mean?

In the office world, an interview is an assessment of whether the candidate has one head, can zip up his pants, and is smart enough as gauged by whether he nods and smiles at the "right" moments. If he can speak in complete sentences and use a few clever polysyllablic words, he's got the inside track. The clincher is the interviewee's asking the interviewer a sympathetic and not-unknowledgable question(s) about the problems the interviewer (usu. a dept. head or even the CEO) faces in his own work. Most interviewers want to talk about themselves; they are not as deeply interested in anything, including whom they're interviewing, as they are in themselves. An interview is about making the interviewer feel good about him- or herself; so set him to talking and then stand back and nod. **The most successful interviews are those in which the interviewee says the least.** The interviewer's hopes and dreams fill in the blanks.

In the world of firefighting, I imagine the oral interview exists for the same reason, with this difference: they want to see what color the candidate is. Or is that a difference? Anyway, its likely purpose is to "get a feel for" the person - for all those intangibles, including "can I work comfortably with this jerk? is he a good fella?" - that don't show up on written tests with any perceived reliability.

The oral tests are likely there precisely to counter the written and other exams. They want to see if you're an Asperger case, a stutterer, a psycho, or have green teeth. A winning personality, a big white smile, rapid patter, the gift of gab, a warm interest in the things the interviewer is interested in - all this is to counterbalance the geekiness of "technical" exams.

An employer who relies on such oral examinations and slights written and physical exams is a fool. The latter exams should be weighted heavily, with the oral simply a final light "check."

Briscoe was a great bullshitter with a shining demeanor, apparently, but he flunked the "knowledge-weighted" exams when he scored insufficiently on the written portion. If that isn't the case, I'll eat my keyboard.

Well, there's a genuinely hard problem here, assuming you don't want the fire department discriminating on the basis of race:

a. There's a history of discrimination on race, and some reason to suspect (at least historically) that the current decisionmakers would like to keep discriminating.

b. A priori, there are some kinds of tests on which blacks do worse than whites. You can make a plausible argument that these tests are relevant, and also a plausible argument that they're not. But written or oral tests that objectively evaluate intelligence are surely going to be affected by the big black/white IQ difference. Similarly, written or oral tests that evaluate success in learning what was taught in school will reflect the black/white performance gap in school. And so on.

c. This sets us up in a kind of "data snooping" mode. I can probably choose the hiring criteria to both adhere to the letter of the law, and to give my favored ethnic mix of winners. People have actually done this in various ways to get around antidiscrimination laws, and more recently to get around laws against reverse-discrimination. Indeed this whole lawsuit is about whether a particular bit of gaming of the promotion criteria (tossing out test results that gave the wrong ethnic mix) is allowed.

As long as we've got this dynamic, we've got the potential for this problem, and this problem is horrible for anyone trying to make hiring/promotion decisions in this environment.

I think the best answers are either:

a. Get rid of antidiscrimination laws entirely, on the theory that they've done most of the good they're going to do and now mostly do harm.

b. Move the law back to only forbidding explicit or overt discrimination. Again, this makes sense if you think those laws have done most of the good they're ever going to do.

c. Embrace the need for a sort of a presumption of discrimination when there's a statistical imbalance in hiring or promotion. In those cases, I think an explicit quota is less damaging than this kind of demand for proofs and counter-proofs of good intent.

I suspect we're doing what we're doing because (a), (b), and (c) are each politically unpopular, while leaving a mess for the HR department and lawyers and courts to deal with is politically much easier. My preference would be (b), though I can see arguments for all three. (I'm enough of a libertarian to prefer (a), and enough of a utilitarian to think widespread irrational discrimination (as opposed to discrimination on the basis of IQ or ability) is a net lose, and deserves to be fought, at the level of (b) or maybe in extreme cases at the level of (a).)

"1) I've never noticed that black guys possess these attributes in abundance, in spite of what some of the insecure white commenters on HBD sites seem to think."

You are telling us what you've noticed or haven't noticed, why? Are you implying that only what you, personally, have noticed has any existence in the real world?If so, I'd suggest looking up the words "arrogance" and "solipsism."

But, if you ARE in possession of sufficient humility to accept it, here's a suggestion. Read Steve long enough, he'll provide for you enough egregious examples of said Black male traits that you'll start, to your surprise, noticing things in the real world you never noticed before.Ah, the beauty of unbiased observation.

2) I can think of no reason why "charisma, confidence, and bluff" should aid anyone in a verbal exam. I've been to lots of technical interviews. Knowing what you're talking about is a must, attitude is not really much of an issue."

Putting aside issues of content, Jesse Jackson is an amazing public speaker‡ and Al Sharpton is none too shabby either. P.J. O'Rourke gave the man his dues in Parliament of Whores:

I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax, and epigram- to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.

The archetype of the smooth-talking but insubstantial black flash artist is too common in our culture to be a fluke and I have seen it confirmed repeatedly through both second-hand observation (TV, film, newspaper) and first-hand personal experience (college, work, and commuting to both on the subways of several major American cities). I last saw it pop up during a Meet the Press panel on the mortgage crisis. While the white panelists went into technical discursions on derivatives and feedback systems, Tavis Smiley, with righteous fury blazing in those almond eyes, unhesitatingly fingered "Guh-reed" as the primary culprit behind the collapse, with no doubt from the tone of his voice that he meant not the greed of homebuyers and their co-ethnic mortgage brokers, but of Big "Take Our Money And Don't Mind Proving You'll Ever Be Able To Pay It Back".

Black media and public personalities can be quite mesmerizing when going on in the prophetic style, and if the subject matter can be approached through the lens of basic social relations and morality they often say many things of value. But when the subject becomes any more complex, the chances of unscripted eyerolls increase dramatically.

Jackson's speech at Tendley Baptist Church during the 1984 Presidential campaign is a great case-in-point. At around the 4:50 mark, when he goes into his final refrain about "stones just lying on the ground", you'd have to be dead not to get goosebumps, and I don't care what your political persuasion is. Good thing he ends strong, because earlier in the speech he uses the fact that blacks buy their share of Russian vodka as "proof" they are capable of handling the demands of Cold War-era foreign relations.

I am so very sick of the po' is me whine. I'm black and you didn't hire me, so you are a racist. I'm black and you didn't promote me, so you sre a raisist. I'm black and you don't agree with me, so you are a racist. I'm incompetent so you can't give me a test otherwise I won't get promoted, cause tests are racist! Equal is as equal does! If you can't cut the mustard try the ketchup, it's called study, read, learn...OMG>>imagine that!

"I am so very sick of the po' is me whine. I'm black and you didn't hire me, so you are a racist. I'm black and you didn't promote me, so you sre a raisist. I'm black and you don't agree with me, so you are a racist. I'm incompetent so you can't give me a test otherwise I won't get promoted, cause tests are racist! Equal is as equal does! If you can't cut the mustard try the ketchup, it's called study, read, learn...OMG>>imagine that!"

And since Steve Sailer doesn't post all our comments, he must be 'racist'.

"The archetype of the smooth-talking but insubstantial black flash artist is too common in our culture to be a fluke..."

Thi skill probably evolved so that its posessors could impress women more effectively. Women don't care about substance, they want style.

"....oh yeah... I forgot to add......

.......sport!"

For some reason this reminded me of the way younger blacks use the word "son" all the time. They end half of their sentences with it. I think it's a recent phenomenon. "You don't know NOTHING, son!" and so on. I've even heard girls say stuff like that to other girls. I guess it's meant as a putdown, kind of like "youngin".

The hilarity of this is revealed when you stop and think about how little most of them would know about a real-world father-son relationship. I don't recall my dad ever addressing me in that tone or even with that word. "Have you done your homework, son?" - that sounds pretty phony to my ears. He'd normally use my given name instead.

Kind of like many black women's hairdos, isn't it? An inept attempt to mimic something first observed across the racial divide.

I'm sure some "sociologist" somewere has already done a paper linking this to oppression and white priviledge.

Incidentally, at interviews for Wall Street investment banks and management consulting firms (they generally only recruit at Top 20 undergrad schools, the Ivies and 5 to 10 others), a portion of an interview, or an entire interview itself (there are several rounds of interviews for these firms) is basically an IQ test, or at least tries to be. They'll ask rapid fire math calculation/logic questions, and brainteasers/puzzles like "What would be the fastest way to move Mt. Fuji?" "How many taxi cabs are there in NYC?" "Why are manhole covers round?" etc. There aren't really correct "answers" to the brainteasers/puzzles, but the interviewers want to get estimates and hear your thought process for arriving at your estimate. Nothing is officially written down during the interviews, though you are allowed to use scratch paper in thinking through the puzzles and trying to get an estimate.

I've heard tech companies like Google and Microsoft do similar things in interviews, along with programming exercise assessments to determine your intelligence.

Some of the foreign companies and banks like HSBC use an actual, formal IQ test before the interview stage, though it's not called "IQ" test but something like "reasoning", "thinking", etc., test. They're usually online and through one of those HR testing companies.

So they look at what college you went to, your major, SAT score (usually on resume), grades, and a de facto IQ "test" in the interview process to get an IQ estimate of you.

It's not a matter of competence vs. incompetence there Sparky, It's a matter of ONE TYPE of competence vs another. That is, from the way I understand it, competence in taking a written exam vs. competence in passing a pen and paper test.

I don't know about you but I think the ability to give and process verbal information might come in handy if your Granddaddy was having a heart attack.

More comedy for you I guess.

"I am so very sick of the po' is me whine. I'm black and you didn't hire me, so you are a racist. I'm black and you didn't promote me, so you sre a raisist. I'm black and you don't agree with me, so you are a racist."

You know, if you take that paragraph and substitute "white" for "black", "it's" for "you are" and "affirmative-action," for "racist" you really have something here!

I imagine all of this nonsense would go away if they recorded the oral test, made a transcript and then had the evalutors grade the transcript. However they are grading the oral test is highly suspect.

I imagine all of this nonsense would go away if they recorded the oral test, made a transcript and then had the evalutors grade the transcript.

WS, you are thinking very bad and possibly Racist thoughts. To the contrary: the solution is to attach a photo of each candidate to his written test.

I remember "Alice's Restaurant," and the plot of that song [sic] hinged on The Man's Blind Justice. It was bad then, sorta, thus it's surely bad now. Race-conscious written testing is fairer, more just, and certain to improve the fire department.

"I'm curious as to why black applicants did so much better in the verbal, as no obvious reason exists for such a result. Is it genuine, or was the verbal put in place specifically to identify and aid the black applicants?"

beep boop beep...unexpected output...must recalculate variables

honestly that is the spergiest statement I've seen in these comments in awhile...yes, Maynard, it's possible for people to bluff their way into advancement...happens all the time outside your robot lair

fucking no eye contact making nerdling...how do you expect to understand complex sociological issues ever

Troof at it again, screwing up an otherwise civilized and data-centric thread by blathering nonsense and posting any old piece of data he can find to back up the brotha. This is becoming so incredibly boring.

"For some reason this reminded me of the way younger blacks use the word "son" all the time. They end half of their sentences with it. I think it's a recent phenomenon. "You don't know NOTHING, son!" and so on. I've even heard girls say stuff like that to other girls. I guess it's meant as a putdown, kind of like "youngin"

"Son" is strictly a New York, New Jersey thing amongst younger blacks, in other parts of the country they say "Dog" or "homie" or "playa".

BTW: I got "Sport" from reading Errol Flynn's biography when I was a teen, he apparently said it all of the time and from what I know, he wasn't "younger" or "black." The book is called "The Two Lives of Errol Flynn" if any of you would like to confirm.

Robert Redford also said it in "The Great Gatsby". Ditto.

"Obviously for racial identification. You can't tell someone's race from multiple choice or short answer questions very well"

Oh come on Bill, they could have found much easier ways to eliminate black applicants.

"I'm curious as to why black applicants did so much better in the verbal, as no obvious reason exists for such a result. Is it genuine, or was the verbal put in place specifically to identify and aid the black applicants?"

According to Steve, "To judge the candidates’ oral responses, New Haven paid to bring in 30 veteran fire department managers from around the country, two-thirds of them minority."

Just take the point, whiner...there's dozens of "obvious" reasons why blacks (or any individual) might excel in an oral test and fail on a more accurate written skill assessment. His comment was truly retarded in it's "humans? I just don't understand them" sperginess. News from planet Earth just arrived...people are influenced by charm, physical presence, racial guilt factors, personality manipulation, personal bias, among many other factors...obviously an oral test will play to these. Yes, I said "obviously", goddammit. And we already know blacks generally fall behind on IQ-correlated testing.

Now that the Talented Tenth own PGC they can do what needs to be done. And, yes, it is brutal by white standards.

But notice how there is no black complaint in PGC.

The black trash in PGC know they are being disciplined by their betters and they accept that.

They respect that, frankly, because they are African and it is a part of the African psyche.

Jacob Zuma, the Zulu President of South Africa, has directed the South African Police Service to "shoot first".He is trying to get the death penalty reinstated in South Africa. None of that p*ssy white liberal European Due Process cr@p.

Last year the black SAPS shot 700 black criminals "trying to escape" etc.

No one is upset ... when blacks do it, that is.

But when the previous white SAPS killed 60-70 black criminals in a single year it was trumpeted as "white genocide!!!".

Blacks treat each other brutally. They expect it of their criminals AND their police.

The irony here is that in older times, replacing the face-to-face interview with a written test was a way to make the hiring process race blind.

And the deeper irony is that this whole area of law and set of court cases, full of smart people making silly and disingenuous arguments, all resolves down to the need not to notice the stable differences in IQ and educational achievement between blacks and whites. That's enough to make people smart enough to graduate from top law schools and argue before the Supreme Court, or make it onto the court as justices or clerks, sound like self-contradicting fools. Cases like this one would be easily resolved otherwise.

"Isn't it a little childish to misspell "Truth" in an attempt to mock him? He writes like an intelligent man; why would you expect him not to speak like one?"

No, it isn't any more childish than referring to people as "Sport", implying they are losers, or being a grammar troll.

"For all the talk about the implications of bell curves here, it seems like a lot of you can barely handle one intelligent black man. Would rather there were none?"

The posters here have tried to engage with Truth on an intellectual level many times. I can't speak for everyone, but I think most people here would love to have a debate with an intelligent black man about HBD but that intelligent black man must also be interested in the debate. That is not the case with Truth.

> You know, if you take that paragraph and substitute "white" for "black", "it's" for "you are" and "affirmative-action," for "racist" you really have something here! <

But "affirmative action" is aggression against talented individuals on account of their race, backed by government guns. Only in gang warfare are people who object to patently unjust physical coercion called "whiners."

Shooting bullets into someone and then laughingly calling him a crybaby and taunting him to get up is characteristic of savages. I suppose you want him to fire back? Because working his ass off is what got him into this predicament.

"No, it isn't any more childish than referring to people as "Sport", implying they are losers, or being a grammar troll."

Errol Flynn referred to people as "Sport," and besides, it's shorter than "anonymous" which most of you go by. I didn't imply that you were losers, I inferred it from your constant whining; from my experience, whiners, generally = losers, and I never grammar troll anyone who isn't lauding his intelligence.

"The posters here have tried to engage with Truth on an intellectual level many times."

I must have been absent that day; or we have a much different view of what constitutes "an intellectual level."

"But "affirmative action" is aggression against talented individuals on account of their race, backed by government guns."

So is "negative" action, and that is why "affirmative action" was created (by white males).

"Shooting bullets into someone and then laughingly calling him a crybaby and taunting him to get up is characteristic of savages."

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